One particularly challenging “reading problem” is figuring out how to reference a specific value nested inside a tangle of hashes and arrays. Not knowing how the object is structured, in terms of size, layers of nesting, or type of nested objects initially made this problem really confusing!

Eventually we learned how to traverse the whole structure and efficiently store the path we were going down as we went.

Craig and I have talked about many different use cases for the method we coded up, but in this case we have released the code embedded in a web application that searches JSON objects for you. If you’ve been working with API and trying to make sense of your queries, we hope this helps!